The Four Marks

The Seven Deadly Sins – at the Scale of a Civilization. More than fourteen centuries ago, Christian monks drew up a list of seven sins. Not laws – a map of the human heart. Envy. Pride. Wrath. Sloth. Greed. Gluttony. Lust. It is still pretty much the most accurate psychology anyone has written. The monks were looking at one soul at a time. Look at whole systems instead, and you find the same seven. A vice that stays private ruins one life. Scaled up, it becomes an institution: a tax, a ministry, an ideology, a budget line. People will always have vices. The question is who pays for them. Adam Smith noticed that we owe our dinner not to the butcher’s kindness but to his self-interest. A free market does not abolish greed – it puts it to work: you get rich only by serving others, and you go bankrupt if you don’t. The vice pays its own bill. Bad systems let the vice send its bill to someone else – the taxpayer, the next generation, the innocent. A good civilization does not abolish sin. It sends the bill to the sinner. So here is what comes next, one sin at a time: 1. Envy – the engine of socialism. If I can’t have it, nobody should. 2. Pride – the planner’s conceit, from Plato’s philosopher-king to the Brussels directive. 3. Wrath – vengeance without trial, from the guillotine to cancel culture. 4. Sloth – comfort as a political program, from bread and circuses to the empty cradle. 5. Greed – the one everybody expects us to defend. We won’t: crony capitalism, the bailout, private profit and public loss. 6. Gluttony – debt. Eating the future. 7. Lust – pleasure cut off from its consequences, and from children. And then the cures: the four old virtues – prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude – and the institutions that make them stick. The monks thought sin was a matter for the confessional. They were half right. It is also a matter for the budget. Show me a country’s budget, and I will tell you which sins it subsidizes. First up: Envy. Envy – the Engine of Socialism. A genie appears to a peasant: "I’ll grant you one wish." The peasant thinks for a long time. His neighbor has a goat. "Kill the neighbor’s goat." That is envy. Not wanting what someone else has – that’s ambition, and it built most of the world. Envy is wanting him not to have it. Even if you gain nothing. Even if you lose. Every other sin at least promises pleasure. Envy promises only that someone else will have less. And it is the one sin nobody ever confesses – because it never calls itself envy. It calls itself fairness. Justice. Equality. Socialism is envy at scale: not lifting the bottom, but cutting the top. Thatcher caught it in one sentence in Parliament: her opponents would rather the poor were poorer, provided the rich were less rich. In experiments, people will pay out of their own pocket to destroy money belonging to others. Whole countries do the same: the tax that raises little but drives away the people it targets, the school that abolishes the advanced class because not everyone can take it, the rule written to bring down whoever got ahead. In Soviet villages, a kulak – a "rich" peasant – was often a man with two cows. Liquidating the kulaks did not give anyone a cow. It gave everyone the famine. That is envy’s bill. Envy aims it at the successful. But the successful leave, or stop trying – and the bill comes back to everyone. Kill the goat and you get no milk. Neither does anyone else. The Greeks knew there were two kinds of rivalry. Hesiod wrote that the potter competes with the potter, the craftsman with the craftsman – and that this strife is good, because it makes everyone work harder. The other kind only destroys. A free society does not abolish envy. It converts it: you may have what your neighbor has – by doing what he did. Socialism converts it the other way, into policy, so that nobody has the goat. The cure is old and simple: gratitude for what you have, and the ambition to build what you don’t. Next: Pride.